Blind Turbo Demodulation for Differentially Encoded OFDM with 2D Trellis Decomposition

Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB)-like systems employ differentially encoded (DE) phase-shift keying (PSK) for transmission. While turbo-DE-PSK receivers offer substantial performance gains through iterative decoding by making the DE-PSK an inner code, they rely on accurate channel estimation without pilots, which is a key challenge in DAB-like scenarios. This paper develops a fully blind turbo-DE-PSK scheme that jointly estimates channel phase, channel gain, and noise variance directly from the received signal. The design leverages a two-dimensional (2D) trellis decomposition for blind phase estimation, complemented by power-based estimators for channel gain and noise variance. We provide a comprehensive system assessment across practical system parameters, including inner code length, phase quantization, and 2D block size. Simulation results show that the blind 2D turbo demodulator approaches the performance of receivers with perfect channel knowledge and remains robust under realistic transmission conditions.